Marco Pantanella

Italy

I first began photographing about twenty years ago. At the beginning, I took pictures of everything, I did not have a preference for anything in particular, until one day, by chance, while browsing through a famous nature magazine, I was struck by the beauty of the images contained in its pages. This is how I began wandering far and wide in the area where I lived, realizing that, after all, I did not need to travel to far away countries to appreciate nature. Surely, there are places that strike in a more direct and immediate way, just think of the African landscapes or of breathtakingly beautiful American parks. However, what is even more overwhelming for me is a walk through a beechwood of the National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise. It just makes me think that certainly, nearby, in the heart of the woods, there is an even richer and exceptional wildlife, surely not to be taken for granted. The important thing is to observe carefully everything around us; only in this way we will be able to catch some aspects, perhaps the most secret and inner, of nature. As time went by, I also discovered to be passionately keen on the mountains; this might be due to the fact that I had lived for 25 years so close to the “laziale” side of the Park of Abruzzo. At first, I could store in my mind’s eye places and emotions through the pictures I took, but photographing was for me no longer just the way to store memories; it also became the means to pass on to others the beauty of the places I visited. For this reason, I started paying more attention to other aspects of a picture such as the composition and the exposure. “Mountains and Photography” are an inseparable binomial for me.